Lilies of the Field

Here's a great post from a blog pointed out by the Martian Anthropologist, titled "Lilies of the Field".
It's about working, and the way society has been stacked to keep the average person working for a few elite powerful groups or individuals, and for naught much to show.

I am very willing to do hard work, be it physical or intellectual - and not just soley for myself. If someone needs help or if there's a team effort worthy of performing, I'm eager and willing to participate. But - every Sunday night, as I gird myself mentally for another "work week" I still say to myself - "There's got to be a better way". Society is structured to keep us busy and distracted. That's got to be it, because we all work MORE now than ever before, and this is after all the "labor saving" devices that have been flooded into the market.

I have no issue with working, expending effort, I'm not "lazy"... or, er, not any "lazier" than average. BUT - it's true, there's a movement that's occurred in the last few hundred years, that breaks up our lives. We work/toil for someone else, for 40-50-60 hours per week, just to make, money which then allows us to buy the things we need. But then we have only a few waking hours per week to actually do all the rest of our work to survive - cooking, cleaning, paying bills.

My thinking is that even at the founding of this (the US) nation, many people had much more time that they didn't have to be "working", and that allowed for intellectual growth, philosophical thinking, and is what lead to a pretty profoundly unique foundation for this country. One that if we still adhered to, we'd be much better off.So - why the change? Well, one thing that this does is it makes it very difficult to stay abreast of what's going on around us. Who can discharge their duties as a citizen, to keep a close guarded watch on the elected officials who guide out lives, if we're too busy "working" for most of our waking hours every day. And - sure, there's TV, Movies, Video Games, Sport, socializing... I have heard arguments that we can curb these "leisure" activities..But studies show that the more complex an organism's mind, the more down time it needs to maintain a healthy and balanced mental process.

I'd argue we are kept so busy we are not even getting enough "leisure" activities to maintain our mental health and balance. Let alone then having time to participate in society as citizens. In fact, it's almost like brainwashing or some other kind of psyops manipulation. Keep us starving for leisure activity, keep us running around like rats in a recursive maze with no end, so that even when we're not working our job, or buying our food, or paying our bills or cooking our meals or cleaning our domiciles, we barely have enough time to grab a smidge of diversion and distraction, but we certainly have no time to bend our intellects to grander notions, notions that might lead to independence, freedom, questioning our elected officials, promoting the welfare of ourselves and our fellow citizens. We are too drained to do anything but acquiesce to whatever we are told by our media that our common will is. We have no resources to question, in any meaningful way, the truth of these statements.